Friday, July 12, 2013

India’s Reflections on the Aldeas SOS Entrepreneurship Project

I have spent three months volunteering with International Service’s
“Greenhouse Project” in La Paz. Our project is centered around two
important goals – empowerment and the raising of nutritional standards
in El Alto.

We focus on empowerment because more than 70 per cent of El Alto’s
families live in poverty. Enabling these families to better their lives
is of paramount importance. The project also recognises that if it is to
empower the most maligned sectors of Bolivian society, it must
help women first and foremost.

India Thorogood with a local Alteño family

Greenhouses can empower by giving individuals and families economic
independence. When vegetables finally bloom they can be sold, they can
provide a sole or a supplementary income for anyone who may need it. But
this can be especially empowering for women.

As part of our role on the project, we spend one day a week helping
to build greenhouses in El Alto. On one particular week, we were sent to
help a woman who had recently lost her husband and had been left with
four children to support. As you can imagine, we felt very motivated to
support this family.

The family live on a small plot in a barren area of El Alto. Their
house consists of only one room, but a greenhouse sits proudly to the
side of it, constructed with bricks and plastic sheeting. Inside grow
vegetables to improve the nutrition of the four children and to improve
their economic standing.

We were tasked with creating bricks to rebuild her greenhouse. We
spent the morning sorting through sand, taking out any large rocks and
ensuring it was suitable to create bricks. The sand was then mixed with
water and hay by members of the community and ourselves. It was left to
dry, and then placed into moulds. Even after all this, we couldn’t quite
believe it when we saw real bricks lying on the sandy ground.

Siobhan Cunningham with local children making bricks for the greenhouse

The Mother of the family was very much a part of the work and a part
of changing her own future. That day we felt as if we had made a genuine
impact on the family’s life, and it certainly felt like empowerment.
Nutrition is important as arguably one of the biggest issues facing
Bolivian society. A third of children are malnourished today in Bolivia
and the rate of malnutrition for children in the poorest households –
where we are working – is as high as 40 percent. This is most important
for Bolivia’s children as when a child does not receive enough nutrition
before the age of 2, this affects not only the development of the body
but of the brain.

We are helping the community around the Portada Triangular children’s
centre to build a greenhouse. This is a part of our work more focused
on nutrition, because of the example this can set to the children.
Arguably, the community will only use the greenhouse to its full
potential if they have a real stake in it, so it is they who are taking
responsibility for building it.

We are also spending one morning a week in the children’s centre next
to the steadily rising greenhouse. We have been closely observing the
food eaten at the centres and have implemented activities based around
nutrition with the children.

Our team has also been carrying out some small-scale research to find
out more about the diet of those in our two work areas in El Alto. We
recently held a research workshop in Portada Triangular. We had observed
that, when faced with formal questionnaires, individuals might
exaggerate their healthy-eating habits or simply get bored of answering
the questions. So, we created fun activities in which information could
be revealed without any pressure.

We led an activity in which the parents were asked to place pictures
of food on a scale of “good” to “bad” health. These items included
Bolivian staples like chicken, corn, potatoes and coca tea. Another task
for the group was to draw around one participant on a large piece of
paper. They then drew a heart, muscles, eyes and other important areas
of the body and wrote next to them what foods they believed to be
beneficial to those areas specifically. The volunteers were interested
to learn it is apparently a Bolivian tradition to feed your child grapes
should they have trouble speaking.

There were two final tasks to gain an understanding of how the
parents cook and shop for food. The first task asked two groups to
imagine shopping for a family of 4 with 100 Bolivianos. We asked the
groups to prioritise food and were wondering whether vegetables, meat or
eggs would be cut. The second listed around eight food items and asked
whether they mostly ate them fried, boiled, baked or raw.

We finished the workshop by serving up food that we had cooked with
nutrition in mind. This included a sweet potato and spinach bake a
quinoa salad and a courgette frittata. The food was received better than
we had expected and the parents even asked for the recipes.

Our final efforts before leaving this beautiful country will be to
use the knowledge gained from our research for two educational
workshops. One in Portada Triangular and one in El Alto. We will also be
producing educational leaflets for both communities with the hope that
these too could have a positive effect.

The Entrepreneurship team in El Alto

We sincerely hope that our “Greenhouse
Project” has had a positive consequence on those in La Paz. We have
certainly enjoyed our project and met some amazing people, such as the
strong woman in El Alto and the enthusiastic parents in Portada
Triangular. If we have had even half the impact that Bolivian people
have had on us then we will leave Bolivia fulfilled.